


Seal Every Dream with a Prayer

by Muccamukk



Series: Post-War Dreaming [3]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Complicated Feelings About a Lot of Things, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Family Drama, Grief/Mourning, Lancaster - Freeform, Long-distance Phone Calls, M/M, Minor Character Death, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 19:11:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16069490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: June 1948. When Lew flies out to San Francisco to visit his dying mother, Dick's sixteen-year-old sister comes up from Lancaster to help look after the hatchery. Dick struggles with his fears that a large inheritance will tempt Lew to stay in California, and that Ann Winters will discover the true nature of Dick and Lew's relationship.





	Seal Every Dream with a Prayer

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant as the first of three follow ups to "This Time the Dream's on Me," which you really need to read before this, if you haven't already.
> 
> This story contains a lot more about dealing with being closeted and societal homophobia than any of my other works. It's fairly sombre, and Lew isn't in it a whole lot, though he's with us in thoughts.
> 
> The title is from Walter Kent's ["When the Roses Bloom Again."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFwR1PVON-s) Thank you to actonbell for reading it over and for cheerleading.

Dick came back into the house just as Nix put the phone down. If he hadn't been able to see that something was wrong just from the hunched set of his shoulders—or how Nix had one hand spread on the table like he needed to hold himself up—the way Nix glanced at Dick and then quickly looked away would have tipped him off.

"Bad news?" Dick asked. He wanted to come up behind Nix and wrap his arms around his waist, but he thought that would be too much contact right now.

"Yeah." Nix's voice was rough, and he still wasn't looking at Dick. "That was Blanche. Mom's, uh, I guess if I want to see her again, I gotta go now."

"Oh, Lew," Dick said, and now he did wrap his arms around Nix and pulled him in until he could rest his chin on his shoulder. Nix let himself be held, pressing his face into Dick's neck. His shoulders shook once, but Dick didn't hear him snuffling like he did when he cried—Dick hated that he knew what Nix sounded like when he wept. "When do you leave?"

"Well..." Nix drew out the word, and Dick could feel the struggle trapped in his chest. "Blanche said she'd foot the tickets, and I could make a flight as early as noon tomorrow, going out of Philly, but..."

But that would leave Dick to manage the farm alone, for who knew how long. "But nothing," Dick told him firmly, even though he didn't know how the heck he'd do it.

They were in the middle of renovating the second barn, which could be put on hold to a certain extent, but not delayed long unless they wanted to start losing contracts. Nevertheless, Nix had held Dick through his own father's death not quite two years before. Nix had worked every day, thick or thin, drunk or sober—and mostly sober at that—for two years without a break, just like he'd promised.

"I'll manage here," Dick told him. "School's out for the summer after today. Ann can come up to help."

"She'll love that." Nix's face was still pressed into Dick's shirt, and it didn't feel like he'd ever move, but Dick knew that Nix had made his decision. He would go. He had to go. "Thank you," Nix said, and Dick stroked his hair and kept holding him.

* * *

Dick drove Nix as far as Lancaster where he could pick up a bus to Philly. Nix had been understandably quiet on the drive down, and Dick was left with all the words that he felt like he ought to say buzzing around in his head.

"I'll call," Nix had said that the bus station, and had touched Dick's knee, but of course hadn't kissed him.

"Take care," Dick had replied. "God bless."

Nix—who didn't believe in God, so far as Dick could tell—had just nodded and then turned and walked away without looking back. Dick'd watched until he vanished into the terminal and then pulled out for his parents house.

Dick had arranged everything with Edith the night before, and indeed Ann was hovering by the door when he came in.

"Chicken farming?" she said as he bent to kiss her cheek on the way by. "Really?"

"Pays better than clerking at the grocery store," Dick said. "Marginally."

Edith was in the kitchen, and pulled him into a hug as he came through. She'd grown thinner since Richard had died, and her hair was white. The five years between Dick's enlistment and his father's death seemed to have aged her five times that, but her grip was firm and her arms strong around his waist. Dick kissed the top of her head

"I've made a pie for you," she said as she turned away.

"I brought you some eggs," Dick told her. "Thank you for talking Ann around. I know she wanted to stay in town with her friends."

"It will be good for her," Edith stated with grim conviction. She should have joined the WAC and commanded a division. "Now go."

Dick would have liked to have stayed at least a little longer, but he really did have to get back to the farm. He took his pie and snagged bags on the way out. They all three barely fit into the Roadmaster's tiny trunk. Ann was already sitting in the passenger's side, poking through the glove box.

"Do you want the top up?" Dick asked.

"This is fine," Ann said airily. She'd tied her sandy brown hair down with a scarf and as Dick started the engine, slipped on a pair of sunglasses. Dick did a double take. He hadn't seen Ann since Easter, and some time in the intervening months his sixteen-year-old sister had grown into herself. She wasn't a beauty, none of the Winters were, but she was pretty in the kind of way that made men look twice: broad freckled cheeks, hazel eyes, full lips, and the Ebenshade nose in the middle of it all. Maybe it wasn't her looks, but the way she held her spine straight and her chin high. Dick hadn't been watching, and little baby Annie Pie had grown at least half way up.

It only took a few minutes to get out of town and onto the county lanes opened up the engine. They hummed along the familiar roads up to Lebanon County, fast on the turns like Nix liked to drive.

Nix had called the land beautiful, but Dick didn't think he could ever feel about it the same way Dick did. Not in a way that made his heart hurt when he looked at the rolling fields and the white-painted houses. Dick had gone to war for the sake of this land, and when he'd come back to it, it had healed his soul. He didn't have words to describe how much he loved it, and he hadn't run into any poem or song that did either. It was why he stayed, even when times were lean, and the days were long. Why Nix stayed, Dick had never been completely sure.

"So what am I doing?" Ann asked.

"Turning eggs, washing trays, packing baby chicks for delivery," Dick said. "Mostly turning eggs. Lewis took nights usually, but I can do that, if you want." Though how he was going to do that and still work on the barn he didn't know. He didn't have the energy he'd had at Toccoa, when he'd marched all night and then run the men through PT three times the next morning. Thirty years old, and a tired old man already.

"Sounds all right," Ann said after considering it. "I guess I can try staying up. It might be fun."

"Nix usually works on the books then, listens to the radio, that kind of thing." Dick didn't know how he was going to sleep without the soft sounds of Nix rustling around the house at all hours. Part of his mind always anticipated the moment when Nix would finally crawl into bed for the last few hours before dawn. Dick would roll over to make a warm place for him, and then curl up in Nix's arms. He hadn't gone without that for more than a night in two years.

"Nix," Ann said, like she was trying out the word. Dick glanced at her, but her shades obscured too much of her face and he couldn't read the set of her mouth. "When is he back?"

"I wish I knew," Dick said. "At least a week." He again tried to silence the part of his brain that told him that a week could easily stretch into forever. That was unworthy. Nix had promised. God, Dick hated the feeling that he was chaining Nix to him with that promise. It had held for two years, and Dick was too pathetic to release Nix from it. He should write Nix a letter—see if there was some way he could put into writing what he never seemed to be able to say—but he was still hoping that Nix wouldn't be on the west coast long enough for mail to find him there.

Ann sat silently for a while, looking out the window over the countryside. Dick wondered if she loved it too. She had never shown any sign of trying to marry a farmer, or talked about wanting to leave the city. Edith had said that Ann was talking about travel, but didn't seem decided, and didn't seem dedicated enough to save up for it, but that had been six months ago. She seemed like a new girl now.

"I'm sorry to steal your weekend," Dick said. "I appreciate the help."

"Oh, no trouble. Who has friends, anyway?"

Dick glanced sideways at her. She had her mouth twisted into the half smile that looked very much like their mother's, which Nix had commented looked like his own. Dick tried to remember what being sixteen had been like, but it was too long ago. He barely remembered who he'd been before the war at all any more. "I won't need you all the time," he said. "You can go into Lebanon to see a picture if you like."

"Sure." That seemed like the best Dick was going to get. He wondered what had happened to the little girl who'd followed him around like his own shadow and begged to be taken on a trip to New York. Maybe something like what had happened to Dick himself. Siblings were funny things, like magnetic poles: when one was pulled into trying to find a connection the other would repel, only to reverse later.

"Well, I appreciate it," he said again, then turned back to the road. The drove the last half hour in silence.

"This is the guest room," Dick said when they got to the house. Nix had just finished repainting the front porch, and it was a cheerful bright blue that made Dick smile when he saw it. "That's my room, that's Nix's room." He pointed out the kitchen and the door to the back porch and the stairs down to the basement as well, but Ann was still looking at the bedrooms.

"Nix's room is the biggest," she noted, and there was a note of accusation in her tone.

"Well he had the bigger bed," Dick tossed off in reply. Of course it was their room, that they shared, and Dick's room was mostly an office, but Dick wasn't about to explain that to his sister. He'd made a show of moving into his tiny room with the narrow bed he'd brought up from Lancaster. It hadn't been slept in save for naps since then. It was strange trying to think of it as his.

"Hmm," was all Ann said.

Dick let it lie. "Get changed. I'll show you the hatchery. We need to turn the eggs."

"Okay," she said, and disappeared into the guestroom with her bags.

"Oh, boy," Dick muttered. He probably should have thought more about how the whole situation would look to Ann. She hadn't been up to visit before, and he'd been so worried about getting Nix off to his flight, that he hadn't considered that she was getting old enough to ask about this kind of thing. Whatever _this kind of thing_ actually entailed.

When they got out to the barns, Ann watched and listened attentively, even took notes as he showed her about the eggs and explained the importance of preventing cross contamination with the laying hens, and of keeping everything perfectly clean. After half an hour, Dick started to wonder if he was just being paranoid. Edith had said that Ann was a good girl and was doing well in school, even if she was a bit spendthrift with her allowance. It wasn't like Dick had been a heck of a lot better at that age. He was just thrown by how fast she was growing. Of course their relationship would change, just like everything else had changed between when Dick had shipped out and when he'd returned home.

He showed her around the property after. It wasn't much, just twelve acres, and most of the buildings bunched together in the corner by the drive: the house, two barns, a kitchen garden, and a chicken run and hutch. The rest was scrub that had been logged a couple of times, and an irrigation pond that no one used. It was mostly full of cattails now, but Dick liked the red-wing blackbirds that nested there. Their calls filled his days. Once, in that first year, Nix had taken him down here and fucked him into a picnic blanket. Dick and Ann stayed on the other side of the pond.

Dick glanced at his watch and figured that Nix was in the air somewhere over him by now, and looked up, holding his hand to the high morning sun looking for contrails. He saw none, but the weather wasn't right. Dick tried not to think about the plane that had crashed not forty miles from Lebanon two days before. All passengers and crew had died in the flaming wreck, and the investigation as to why wasn't even finished. He wished Nix good luck, wherever he'd ended up.

Ann circled back to the chicken run, watching the hens fuss and chase each other. A number of them were deformed in some way, missing a wing or limping. Dick had a tendency to keep misshapen chicks instead of killing them and throwing them out, like he was supposed to. Some of them survived into laying hens and young roosters. "Chicken for dinner a lot?" Ann asked.

"Tonight, anyway," Dick agreed. "Lew killed a rooster before he left, after that...."

"You don't kill them?"

"No," Dick said, but didn't explain. He'd meant to, the first time, but then couldn't do it. It turned out that he didn't have any more killing in him, not even for food. Nix had been good at not making fun of him about it, and hadn't suggested that Dick try again. Since then, excess birds had showed up headless, gutted and plucked, no comment made.

"Hmm," Ann said. She'd learned that sound from Edith, and in Dick's experience it meant that a judgement was being formed, but left pending on further data or the right time.

Whenever that time was, it didn't come that morning or the rest of the afternoon, though Dick kept running into Ann poking around odd corners trying to find things and cleaning. Dick had thought the house _was_ clean. It would have passed a Sobel inspection, but Ann seemed to have her own ideas. That too was not unlike living with Edith.

Dick pieced and fried the chicken and served it with some potatoes and broad beans. The last were from the garden, which Nix managed with some success. Plants seemed to die when Dick looked at them too long. He had the pie from Edith for dessert, which was fancier than he or Nix usually got. None of it was as good as the cooking Ann got at home, or could probably do herself now, and Dick felt a little ashamed.

"This is good," Ann had said during dinner, sounding a little too surprised for Dick's liking. Now she asked, "Do you cook every night?"

"No, Nix and I alternate, when we're not living on sandwiches." Which was probably too much of the time.

Dick expected another _Hmm_ , but Ann didn't say anything this time. That was almost more worrying.

"So are you all right to stay up?" Dick asked.

"Sure," Ann said. "I'll wake you up if the barn catches fire."

Dick packed it in, almost, but not quite, turning into Nix's bedroom before he remembered where he was supposed to be. Despite the warmth of midsummer's night, the bed in the office felt strange and cold, and Dick tossed and turned for a long time before he slept.

* * *

The next day passed without incident. Ann borrowed the car to go into Lebanon at one point, and did a chick delivery at another. Otherwise she stuck to the farm, turning eggs and scrubbing trays. She took on Nix's garden, much to Dick's relief, and only raised her eyebrows when Dick said he didn't know much about it. Dick worked on the barn, going out in the predawn light and working most of the day, just to keep from thinking too much. He didn't like his own thoughts much these days, and it helped to be too busy or too tired to do more than the task in front of him. Ann took over much of the cooking. Dick wished Edith had taught him to cook the same as she'd clearly taught Ann.

On Sunday, Dick drove them to the little brick Lutheran church for service, and Ann renewed her interest in what seemed to be her favourite topic. "Does Nix go here?" she asked, "Or is there an Episcopal church that he likes better?"

"No, Nix goes here," Dick said, and then realising that this was not going to stand up under any kind of scrutiny, qualified, "at Christmas and Easter."

Dick liked his church. The congregants were almost entirely local farming families, and the minister was a vet about Dick's age who'd been a chaplain in the U.S. Marines and had served at Okinawa. This was his first church, and he seemed determined to raise the spirit of a band of stolid farming folk, whether they liked it or not. Dick wished he could have come away from the war with that much zeal. 

The minster preached Matthew 10 about finding the lost sheep among one's own people, and as always Dick felt a pang of concern for Nix. But Dick had long since decided that a man's soul was his own business and it was God's business and it sure the heck wasn't Dick's business.

Ann seemed to have picked up either faith or at least a sense of propriety. Dick remembered how she'd used to fidget through services, and the switching she'd get for it from their father. Though it occurred to him that that had been before he'd gone to college, and Ann had been six. It seemed like that hadn't been so long ago.

After service, the church's women immediately gathered Ann to their collective bosom and hustled her off to the kitchen, while Dick talked to Old Man Holtz and tried not to worry too much.

On the drive home, Ann said, "I think that the minister's sister, Betsy Olafsen, is sweet on you."

"That right?" Dick asked, though he was well aware. Pretending he hadn't noticed seemed to be the best defence.

Ann fussed with the corners of her scarf in a way that would have looked coquettish if Dick wasn't so worried about where this was going to lead. "She says she worries about you two alone out there without a woman in the house to look after you."

Dick almost, _almost_ slipped and said that they looked after each other, but he caught the words a moment before they escaped his lips, and said instead, "We do all right."

"You know it's not the same," Ann said.

They turned into the driveway then, passing the stately _Winters & Nixon Hatchery_ sign that Nix was so proud of, and Dick didn't answer until he'd put the car in park and got out to hold the door for Ann. "Miss Olafsen is a fine girl," he said, "but I'm not interested."

"You're not interested in anyone," Ann complained. "How are you going to get married if you haven't gone out with a single local girl in two years?"

"I'm not looking to get married right now." Rather he would have been, but for the double problem of neither church nor state recognising that kind of bond between two men, and the fact that he wasn't sure that Nix would have been interested even if they could have tied the knot. Dick probably should take a few of the local girls out to the movies or something though. Nix did the odd time, just to keep the gossip down.

Ann didn't comment, just went to the icebox and took out the lunch that she'd made the day before. That Mennonite habit still stuck on her part. Dick defiled the Sabbath by going out to turn the eggs.

They fell into quiet habits for the rest of the week, though Dick still didn't sleep well in the narrow bed, and he still found Ann's obsessive housekeeping galling. He didn't know if she was under orders from their mother, or if she was trying to show him what having a woman in the house would look like, or if she just couldn't help herself. She washed and scrubbed and swept until the house didn't smell like Nix any more, and Dick wanted to demand that she have a shred of pity and stop.

They didn't talk much past day to day business and comments on radio programming. It wasn't like being with Nix, where they could fall into easy debate about this or that event during the war, or what some old comrade was doing now, or what Truman had said about the Russians. Dick had used to read aloud in the evenings, but the novel they'd been working through sat untouched in the livingroom, a marker stuck a third of the way through. Ann tidied it back onto the shelf, and Dick was glad he didn't have to look at it any more.

He missed being touched, not just the sex, which he also missed, but the casual intimacy of living together. Ann would pat his elbow or kiss his cheek on an almost motherly way that she'd settled into. It wasn't the same as being able to wrap his arms around Nix's waist, or stroke his hair, or kiss him when passing in the hall. A touch on the arm, a hand on the lower back, curling up together in bed. It had been hard enough giving up Nix the first time, after the war, when they'd been best friends and occasional lovers. Now, when Nix was embedded in every part of every day, Dick didn't know if he would survive it when Nix left.

It was his own fault. He shouldn't have bent Nix to that promise. If he hadn't, he'd be able to be sure that Nix was there because he wanted to be, not because he felt bad for Dick, or for some inexplicable reason felt like he owed Dick. If they were this tightly wound together now, what would it feel like in two years, when Nix decided it was time to disentangle his life from Dick's? He was out in California right now, remembering exactly what he'd used to have, before he'd given everything up to come live on a chicken hatchery with a lover he could never marry.

* * *

It was six days before Nix called, and then late at night. The phone ringing woke Dick up. He hit the floor with a thud, the sheets tangling around his legs, and was so disorientated in the dark that he walked into a closet. He blinked, forcing his brain to turn on, and realised where he was. If he'd been in the room he shared with Nix, this would have been the door to a hall. As it was, he had a face full of his own Class As.

The phone stopped ringing, and he heard Ann's voice in the hall. "Oh, hello, Mr. Nixon," she said, syrupy sweet, and Dick spun around and bolted for the door, the rag rug skidding under his feet. Ann didn't have time to get out more than a, "He's just coming now," before Dick snatched the phone away.

"Nix," he said, and Lord he shouldn't have said anything because there was too much of him in the single word, and Ann was right there. His voice was rough with need, and he was sure it was written all over his face as well.

"Hey, Dick," the long-distance call distorted Nix's voice, but it came through clear enough to tell that he was more than three drinks in.

"You okay?" Dick asked. He was still clinging to the phone with both hands, and he looked up to see Ann watching him with wide eyes. He realised that he'd come far too close to pushing her to get the phone away.

"She's gone, Dick," Nix said, and then he started to cry. Dick could hear shaky wet breaths and the odd hiccup, but nothing coherent.

Dick let out a long breath and pulled the cradle off the side table so that he could sit on the floor with his knees pulled up. If Nix hadn't been twenty five hundred miles away, Dick would have pulled him into his arms and held him until the world felt a little more manageable. Now all he could do was try and put how much he meant it into his voice and hope that some of it carried across the telephone lines. "I'm so sorry, Lew," he said. Then, because he could think of anything else to say, and he could hardly whisper sweet nothings over the phone with his sister ten feet away, asked, "How's Blanche holding up?"

Nix sniffed, then blew his nose. The question seemed to pull him together a little. "Oh, bawling her eyes out, same as me," he said. "I don't know why. It's not like it was a surprise. She's been sick for years. She was sick last time you met her." The only time Dick had met her, which had been January '46. "But..."

"But, it's not the same," Dick said. "You know that."

"Yeah," Nix said, and his voice broke again. Dick wondered how much he'd had to drink, to be this weepy. "Anyway, I wanted to... I needed to hear your voice. I wish you were here,"

"I know," Dick said again. "I do too, Nix." Rather he wished Nix were here. He wanted to ask when Nix was coming home, but didn't dare.

As usual, Nix seemed to read his mind. "And I guess, I needed to let you know that I'll be staying another weekend. They can't read the will until Monday, and there's the funeral. Christ, I actually think that's tomorrow."

"Of course, take as long as you need. It's fine," Dick told him, hoping the lie didn't show in his voice. "Ann and I are holding down the fort."

"Yeah, okay," Nix said, and that seemed to be all there was to say, but even though Dick could almost hear the long-distance bill ticking up, neither of them ended the call. "How's it been going with Ann, anyway?" Nix asked, finally.

Dick knew that Nix didn't really care about Ann, or even about the hatchery, he just didn't want to end this one strand of connection between them. So Dick told Nix about the hatch of Rhode Island Reds that they'd got ninety-eight percent on, and how Ann was doing with the garden, and how the barn was coming along. He talked for ten minutes, and Nix listened. Dick could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, but he didn't say anything.

Finally, Dick wound down, having run out of things to tell him, and Nix said suddenly, "Shit, I'm sorry. I just realised I had the time zones backwards. It's late there, isn't it. Did I wake you up?"

"Yeah, you did," Dick said. "I don't mind. It's good to hear from you. I'm sorry about Mrs. Nixon."

Nix let out another long, shaky sigh before he said, "Yeah. Thanks, Dick. I'll get home as soon as I can."

Dick wasn't going to argue that one. "All right. Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight. I love you," Nix said, and hung up before Dick could answer. Dick hoped that the hello girl hadn't cared enough to listen in. Hopefully if she had, the hatchery minutia had finished her off.

Dick held the phone to his chest for a long time, then finally pushed up and set it back on its table. Ann had disappeared outside, presumably to turn the eggs, but he knew that she'd heard a lot. He had no idea what girls her age heard about such things, but he knew that he'd been dangerously open early in the conversation, and she was already curious about Nix.

She would be at least half an hour, and Dick decided that rather than answering questions, he was going to go back to bed and deal with it in the morning. He'd turned into his and Nix's room before he even realised where he was going, and stood for a moment staring at the bed. It was lit only by the hall lamp, and Dick remembered how he and Nix had broken it in that first night. A fertility ritual, they'd called it.

His throat felt tight, so he turned away from their room and went to sleep in his office like he was supposed to.

The next morning, Ann was making them toast and omelettes and Dick was making a second pot of coffee when she asked, "So when is Mr. Nixon coming back?"

Dick paused for a moment to gather himself conversation. "He didn't know," he said. "He said they were reading the will on Monday, and he'd try to come back after that. We should have you back in Lancaster before weekend after next, if that's what you're worried about."

"Oh, no," she said, as though she hadn't sulked the whole drive up and hadn't been writing daily letters to her girlfriends. "I like it up here, and I don't mind helping."

"That's good to hear," Dick said, oddly gratified.

Ann continued, not put off by his attempted diversion. "Only, I wonder if he'll have to stay and work out his property, if he inherits very much."

Dick had been wondering the same thing. "I don't know," he said. "Lew didn't say anything about that." He'd mentioned that Doris Nixon had owned an island, or part of an island or something. Did Nix own an island now?

"Is his family very rich?" Ann asked. She plated the omelettes and toast and plunked them down at the kitchen table, then waited for Dick to sit too.

"Yes," Dick said, because there was no other answer, "but Nix's father cut him out of his will when he found out that Nix moved up here, and I don't know what his mother did."

"Hmm," Ann said, but then she said grace instead of asking more questions.

Dick glad. It had been hard enough to deal with the idea that Nix's choice to live with Dick had alienated Nix's father to the point of being disowned. Dick had a strong dislike of Stanhope Nixon anyway, but Doris Nixon had seemed like a good women when he'd met her. Surely she'd left her only son something. Why should she have cared if Nix chose farming over working in his father's factory. Given that they'd been divorced, Dick assumed that she hadn't liked Stanhope either, and wouldn't have cared if Nix was speaking to him or not. But would she have cared if she got wind of what Dick and Nix really were to each other? Dick could only assume so. Most people did. The bars and parks in New York, or any city, were full of young men who'd been thrown out of their homes and cut off by their families over similar revelations.

As Dick got up to clear the dishes away, he wondered if he was hoping that Nix had been cast out from his family so that he would have to stay on the farm, and Dick wouldn't have to be alone. Was he that petty and possessive? The Bible said that the love of money was the root of all evil, and to follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness. He didn't know how he could be wanting less money while simultaneously not following after a single one of those things. Patience and meekness especially had never been his strong suits.

Dick was too proud, and a fool besides, but he'd always known that. Nix had never seemed to mind it in him, had said he was glad that Dick had at least a few foibles to mock.

Without Nix, there would be no one who made fun of Dick.

Dick worked on the barn through lunch, and when he got in, he found that Ann had killed a rooster and was roasting it. "How did you know to do that?" he asked. He found the idea of his little sister slaughtering something unsettling.

"I walked over to Mrs. Parnell's next door and asked her to show me," Ann said. She looked pleased with herself, but still had blood under her fingernails. Dick thought of Christmas Eve in Bastogne, and Harry Welsh's blood on his hands. He'd had nothing to scrub it off with, and it had lingered under his nails for days.

"That was smart thinking," Dick said, offering her the praise she was obviously fishing for. "I'm glad Mrs. Parnell was about to help. You should make her some cookies." The Parnells had always been good to Dick and Nix, but he didn't want to carry a debt to them.

Ann didn't seem to have thought that far ahead, but took up the logic on it when Dick mentioned it. Dinner was half an hour out, and Dick went to wash up.

Ann waited until they were clearing the dishes at the end of the meal to spring her long-anticipated interrogation. "Dick," she said, "why is Lewis Nixon here?"

Dick considered deflecting by pointing out that Nix was in fact in San Francisco, but that would be too obvious. "We're business partners," he said. "We talked about going into business together during the war. He thought I could work for his father, but when that didn't turn out to be a good idea, he came here. We work well together and like each other's company."

"But his family is rich," Ann said. "His father has that factory town in New Jersey, and his mother owns land. He doesn't have to work at all, let alone on a chicken farm. Why is a rich boy like that up in Lebanon County?"

"Well, I guess he likes it here," Dick said, pretending it wasn't a question he'd asked himself a dozen times a day. Nix said that he loved Dick, even if Dick never quite believed that could be true.

Ann had set the dishes aside and was leaning back against the kitchen counter, her arms crossed. Their father had always stood like that when he was in the middle of digging his heels in for a really good fight. "He'll never get all the girls and dancing and drinking he likes out here. I read your letters to Mom; I know that he was a lush and a... a womaniser. He'll never marry again if he doesn't go to church and you two never have people over. Does he just plan to stay here forever, with you?"

"Not forever," Dick said. He realised he was matching her posture, and made himself unfold his arms and clutch the counter behind him. "Not forever. Just two more years. We made a deal for four, to get me started out here. I don't know why he decided to help. Maybe he figured he owed me, after serving together, though he saved my life more times than I saved his. Maybe he just wanted a break from New Jersey. His father is a hard man. Maybe he likes running a chicken hatchery and living with a teetotalling Lutheran with no sense of humour. I don't know, and I've never asked. So long as he stays, I don't care why."

That had been too much. Ann's lips had thinned into a tight line, and she was watching him with the exact expression Edith Winters had worn when she's found out that ten-year-old Dick had stolen a pie and spent the afternoon eating it down by the creek, instead of staying inside and working on his homework as ordered. "And why do you want him to stay so very badly?" she asked.

Dick had been half expecting that question since the day she'd arrived, and he still hadn't thought of an answer that would make sense to her. Nix was his whole world, that was why. He shook his head and said nothing.

Ann sighed and looked down at the floor between them. It was covered in a rag rug that Edith's mother had made. "Dick," she said, then paused again, licking her lips. "What would you do if I slept with a fellow and turned up expecting?"

Without thinking, Dick's eyes dropped to her belly, but it had the same farmgirl's roundness as always, nothing more. He didn't know what to do with this sudden tangent, so he answered as honestly as he could. "Is this fellow marrying you?"

"He's not," she said. "I won't have him, and he's already married."

Dick was really hoping this was hypothetical, but he said, "Then I guess I'd do my best to help look after you and the baby. You could move out here if you needed to. Though I think Mom would help you too." Even if she never let Ann out of her sight again.

"But it wouldn't bother you that I'd committed adultery?"

This was making more sense now. "That would be between you and God," Dick said. "It's not mine to separate the sheep from the goats. You're my sister, and I love you." And he didn't know what he was going to do if she turned her back on him forever by the end of this conversation. Weep, probably. He was seeing an immediate downside to having worked himself to exhaustion every day for the last week.

"But of course," she said, because she had their mother's brutal logic, "in that scenario, I would have stopped sinning. You and Mr. Nixon haven't, have you?"

"No," Dick said. What point was there in lying? She'd clearly worked it out, probably suspected since the day she'd gotten here, if not for the past two years.

"But you're my brother, and I love you," she said, and Dick could see that there were tears in her eyes. "So what do I do?"

Dick shook his head again. He honestly didn't know. He didn't think that it would help to offer some kind of explanation as to how he didn't find any sin in the sodomy out of wedlock that regularly graced the double bed. Especially since he didn't have any reason except that he didn't feel like a love that glowed in his heart like his love for Nix did could be wrong in God's eyes. "I don't know. All I know is that I can't change what I am, Annie."

"And what is that?"

He took a breath, and quoted, "'Whither he goest, I will go; and where he lodgest, I will lodge: his people shall be my people, and his God my God. Where he diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part him and me.'"

Ann was crying in earnest now, but silently, tears running down her broad cheeks and her nose turning red, but her breath came steady and even. Their mother had always said that there was no sobbing from an Esbenshade woman, just grief, and she'd said it like she was proud of that. "And if his people and yours cast you out? What then?"

"Then I'll still go with him and be buried with him," Dick told her. "So long as he'll have me." That, of course, was the catch.

"Can you let me alone awhile?" Ann asked. "I need to think." It was getting late, and Dick didn't think she wanted to be wandering the country roads by herself, so he let her have the house. He went out into the hatchery and watched the eggs in the hatching tray hopefully. They were due to start hatching in the next twelve hours, but sometimes a chick would be early. Dick figured he could about use a reminder of why he was here at all.

He'd promised God at the end of that first day in Normandy that if he survived the coming battles, he would get a farm and not kill again. With Nix's help he'd done that, and he loved it. He loved working with his hands and spending so much time outside. He loved that his work fostered new life, and he loved that he was both part of his family's tradition and something new that he'd made. He and Nix had made it together. Dick loved that too, and loved sharing his life with Nix.

It had seemed like Nix had loved it too. Dick shouldn't be doubting that, but it was so hard to picture: Lewis Nixon III leaving his idle life in Princeton or New York or San Francisco and putting in day after day of labour. Two years in, it still felt like too radical a change, and far too good to be true. If it would be, if Nix left him either now or in two years, if Ann shunned Dick and made sure that Edith shunned him too, Dick didn't know how he would go on.

What he did know was that he would go on. He would keep his promise to God, give or take a little maybe-sin along the way. Even if he life was to be a lonely one, Dick would would do his best to make sure it was long. He was a Winters and an Esbenshade and a paratrooper, and giving up wasn't in him. If it had been, he would have folded in Bastogne, or that night in Joigny, after he and Nix had agreed to end it between them.

Dick went about turning the eggs until he'd gotten to the end of the line of warming lights. Then he swept the floor and checked the back up generator. It was almost eight by the time he'd done all the chores, and the sun was just setting through the birches along the road. None of the eggs had shown any sign of hatching, and Dick gave up on them for the night.

Ann had turned on the kitchen lights, and Dick headed in, thinking of all the times he'd gone inside to find Nix doing the dishes or reading at the kitchen table, and how sweet all those kisses had been. Nothing that happened could diminish the memory of those moments, he decided, not even Nix leaving him.

Ann was just finishing up the dishes, and when Dick came in, she turned towards him. She wasn't crying any more, but her nose was still red. "I still don't know what to do," she said.

"Is doing nothing a choice?" Dick asked. "You can decide later."

"No," Ann told him, ruthlessly logical to the end. "Inaction is itself a choice, and in silence is consent."

"That's true." Dick had been hoping she didn't remember that little dictum, though he'd been the one to quote it often enough as a smug teenager. "Would you like to go home?" he asked. "I could drive you."

"I'm sure locking us together in a car for the next hour would help," Ann snapped, she turned to scrub away at a splash of food on the counter that Dick knew was a stain. He was pretty sure she knew it too. "No, I'll stay here, and help until Mr. Nixon gets back. I promised."

"That's good of you," Dick said. He had expected more fall out. Maybe that was yet to come.

"Don't think it means I approve," Ann added sharply, and Dick didn't even try to object that at the very least he wasn't likely to think it did. She'd made her disapproval pretty damn clear.

He went to bed soon after, and was exhausted enough to immediately fall into a deep, nearly dreamless sleep.

Ann was still there in the morning, and she was there the morning after too. They went to church again on Sunday, and Ann didn't even complain about the church women grilling her as to Dick's marriage plans. It occurred to Dick then that with as much as Ann knew, she could choose to stand up on a Sunday morning and denounce him and Nix, and utterly destroy both of their lives. She could call the police. She could tell their mother. But she didn't do any of those things, not yet.

Dick didn't know if he found this new silence more restful or not, but it was better than than being disowned. What had Nix felt, he wondered, after that huge fight with Stanhope Nixon? The break had been over the phone, and Dick hadn't witnessed it, but he had seen Nix later, tight-lipped and grim. For all Nix had said he'd known it was coming, it can't have hurt less, and he'd done it for Dick.

In the passage from the Book of Ruth Dick had quoted, he should have been the one receiving the promise. Nix had certainly never asked Dick to leave anything. It was Nix who was the one who'd forsaken all others, not Dick. He was the one who'd said that he'd always loved Dick and that he would never stop. He was the one who'd sworn up and down that this was what he really wanted to do. He'd promised to turn a broken down farm that no one really wanted into a happy place that was full of life, and he had.

Why did Dick have so much trouble believing him?

Maybe it was just that after all that war and death and loss, Dick couldn't believe that anything as miraculous as this could happen, let alone could happen to him.

On the afternoon of the next day, Ann found Dick out by the hatchery, scrubbing trays.

"Mr. Nixon called," she said.

Dick dropped the tray, and it clattered against the cement. "You should have come and got me," he snapped. He could have heard Nix's voice again.

Ann jerked her chin up and scowled. "I offered. He said he just wanted to pass on a message."

"Oh?" Dick asked, he tried to brace himself for whatever it was, but he knew that if it was bad news no wall he set up would be able to withstand it.

"Oh don't look like that," Ann snapped. "He just said that he was flying back tomorrow, and that he knew that he'd be getting into Lancaster late, so you could either pick him up at the 10:30 bus, or if you didn't show, he'd go to the Y, and you could pick him up in the morning, 'probably too goddamn early' were his exact words, and then he apologised for swearing in front of a lady, he'd just been around his sister, who had a mouth like an enlisted marine."

Dick laughed. He hadn't laughed in almost two weeks, but of course it was Nix who'd gotten it out of him, even if by proxy. "All right," he said. "I'll pick him up. If it's too late to drop you back home, I can run you down in the morning."

"I'll go tomorrow night. You can explain to Mom why I'm out so late."

They were standing just a few feet apart, Dick in a wet button down shirt and overalls, her in a house dress which strained across her shoulders. They could be any pair of siblings on any farm in Pennsylvania, working together and talking about their plans for the next few days. Or she could ruin Dick. Or she could go back to Lancaster and never speak to him again. He had no right to push her, but he couldn't help it.

"Am I going to have to explain anything else to Mom?" he asked.

Ann glanced away, then met Dick's eyes. She hadn't been sleeping well, he realised, though she said she didn't mind doing Nix's night shifts. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her skin was waxen and pale. "No," she said. "If she doesn't know, I won't tell her. I still don't..." she hesitated, "I still don't like it. I don't want you to think that I think it's all right."

Dick nodded. "I understand."

"But that's your business, yours and Mom's. I won't tell her."

Dick had always wondered how much Edith knew, but had always been too afraid to ask. He wasn't close to his cousins, and with his father a year gone now, Ann and Edith were all the family he had left. "Thank you," he said. "You have no idea what that means to me."

Ann snorted. "I have some. I used to follow you around like a shadow, remember that? Mom was always telling you to be nice and put up with me, but she didn't need to. You were so good to me. You took me to New York for a play, and didn't tell Dad how much that hat cost, and that I'd borrowed from you for it. Then you went to war. You were all those years and years at war. We'd read in the paper about all those terrible battles, and Mom scoured the casualty lists every day, in case the Western Union man had somehow missed coming. I kept trying to imagine what it was like based on Mr. Murrow's broadcasts, and the little clips in the news reels, but I couldn't, and your letters never really said either. Then after all that, you came back. and maybe you're different now, but you're still my brother. How can I cast you out when I love you so much?"

She wasn't crying. Her face was open, and vulnerable, and Dick saw for a moment the eleven year old girl he'd left on that last visit to Lancaster before he'd shipped out. She'd still worn her hair in pigtails then, but her wide hazel eyes had been the same. They were their father's eyes—Dick's paleness had come from Edith—and he couldn't look at her and not love her. He would love her even if she told the whole damn world what he was. In '43, she'd thrown her arms around his neck and clung to him until he'd peeled her away, then clung to Edith with her face pressed against her mother's shoulder. Now, she stood her own woman, lovely and almost grown, with the strength of the Esbenshades in her straight back and squared shoulders. Dick leaned down and kissed her forehead, careful not to dirty her dress with his grimy hands.

"Thank you," he said again, and he hoped that covered everything she'd done around the place in the past ten days, and everything she'd promised not to say, even if she didn't understand why Dick would risk himself like that, both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of God.

"He made you laugh," she said, like she'd just discovered a new language, and discovered also that she could speak it. "He said that about his sister on purpose to make you laugh."

"Yeah," Dick said, "he probably did."

Ann didn't say anything else, just shook her head sharply and went back in the house. Only when she was gone did Dick realise that he'd forgotten to ask if Nix had said anything about the will.

Tuesday seemed to stretch into infinity. Nix hadn't said anything about the will to Ann. All she knew was that he was coming back. Dick spent four hours on the road delivering chicks and picking up eggs, and by the time he got back, Ann had an early dinner ready.

Dick ate mechanically though the food was good. He or Nix really needed to learn to cook this well. All he could think was that it took about an hour to drive down to the bus station, and he couldn't possibly justify leaving until nine at the earliest, and nine was hours away yet. He was jittering out of his shoes. It felt like he was about to go on a jump, but without the sense of purpose that had proceeded Normandy and Market Garden. He remembered that last jump out of Joigny, after Nix had shipped back to the US, how it had felt to step out the door and fling himself into the sky one last time. He'd known that that he'd never feel that way again, and it had been a mark of changing his life, a dedication to finding something new when he got home and was just Mr. R. D. Winters again. Only he'd failed at that, badly, and Nix had had to rescue him.

Ann was watching him sympathetically, then she got up and turned on the radio. There was some silly radio play on, and Dick leaned back and listened to it as Ann did the dishes. He was behind on the books, so he spent the next hour catching everything up to Nix's standards, and then they were ready to go.

"Drop me off first?" Ann asked, giving him an excuse, so Dick did. She kissed him on the cheek when she climbed out of the car, not bothering to wait for him to open the door or carry her bags. "Good luck," she said.

"Bless you," Dick answered, and meant it with all his heart.

The bus was just late enough to give Dick a chance to forecast catastrophe, but then it pulled up at quarter to, and Nix was the first person off. He must have elbowed his way forward, or sat next to the driver or something. He looked tired, but not beaten down, and he hadn't been drinking. His tie was loosened enough to show the hollow of his throat.

Dick walked half way across the platform and waited, not even sure what to do or say. What he wanted to do was pull Nix into his arms and kiss him until the world ended. What he did was stop, and wait for Nix to come to a halt in front of him. Nix held out a hand, and Dick shook it. His touch made Dick shiver, and he seemed to move of his own accord as he pulled Nix into a brief sideways hug.

The smell of cigarette smoke and Nix's cologne filled his senses, and Dick felt almost two weeks of tension melting out of him. They walked back to the car so close their shoulders brushed. They could have held hands, if they dared. Dick let their fingers touch a few times.

When they got to the car, Nix said, "You look done in, I'll drive."

Dick nodded and tossed him the keys. There was a comforting familiarity to letting Nix drive him out of Lancaster up to Lebanon County, and he slid across the bench seat until their thighs touched. Nix risked a quick peck on his cheek as they pulled away, covering it by checking behind him to back out of the parking spot.

"So how'd it go yesterday?" Dick asked once they were on the road out of town.

"You mean are we rich beyond our wildest dreams?" Nix asked, and Dick couldn't tell if the anger was directed at him for asking, or at something else.

"I meant 'how'd it go?'" Dick replied mildly. "But I'm guessing the answer is 'not so swell.'"

"Ha. Well, she didn't cut me out of the will, anyway," Nix said. "It's still split right down the middle between us, but it's all in trust until Blanche turns thirty. She's not entirely thrilled, let me tell you, but at least she gets an allowance."

"And you?" Dick asked. Nix was watching the road, which was good, or would be if Dick thought it wasn't just to avoid looking at him.

"Oh, I get nothing. Guess Mom figured I could either support myself or go crawling back to dear old dad. Which, frankly, I'd rather starve."

"I wouldn't let you starve, Lew."

"No?" Nix asked, and his tone was light, but then he turned to Dick with a breathtaking intensity, "Not even when I dash off to California and stick you with your sister for ten days?"

"Never," Dick said.

They weren't five minutes out of Lancaster, but Nix turned off onto a dirt road, and then turned again up a gravel drive, parking far from any light. The house at the end of the drive was dark, and no dog barked. The hand brake clicked, and then he turned off the engine, and the sound of crickets filled the night, and nothing else. Dick smelled hay and damp hedgerows and Nix, and closed his eyes. He wasn't surprised when Nix leaned in and kissed him on the lips. Dick kissed back, running his fingers through Nix's hair and knocking his hat off. He half twisted around so that he was resting on one hip, which let Nix run his hands under Dick's jacket and up and down his back. Nix pulled his shirt free and touched Dick skin against skin.

They broke the kiss and wrapped their arms around each other holding on with all their strength. "Oh, God," Nix said into his ear, "I couldn't wait another second. Jesus, I missed you."

"I missed you too, Nix," Dick said, and wished that he knew how to put everything that had happened over the past ten days into words. How he'd been so afraid that Nix wouldn't come back to him, and Dick's decision that he would continue on the farm regardless of a broken heart, and his conversations with Ann about why Nix was there, and how Dick had realised that Nix was the faithful one, the one who promised everything and then delivered on it, while Dick doubted. He doubted still, on some level. With the money locked away for another five years, he couldn't know for sure what Nix would do when he came into so much wealth in California. Dick knew they should talk about all this, but was too afraid of what the answers might be to start in on any of the topics that mattered. Instead, he kissed Nix's jaw, next to his ear, and whispered, "I wish I could tell you how much."

"Yeah?" Nix asked. "How about you show me instead."

Nix kissed Dick again, and then started the car and pulled out of the drive and put them back on the road to Lebanon County. Dick stayed where he was, his head on Nix's shoulder, his hand on Nix's chest. It was dangerous, but he didn't care. He didn't want to let go of Nix again, not even for another second. He promised himself that when they got home they'd rechristen in that bed, and that Nix would know by touch everything Dick had ever felt about him.

If Dick couldn't find a way to show him that night, he would have to keep trying for every night they had together.


End file.
